Three Kings
Victor Davis Hanson isn’t happy:
The theme of the movie — when George Clooney was not dodging a bankrupt media or Saddam’s poison gas mortars — was that we had left brave Shiites hanging to be butchered by Saddam’s henchmen, and apparently were unwilling to do the right thing and remove a murderous dictator and try to help the people of Iraq. The only common denominator between not doing enough in Three Kings and doing too much in Redacted, Syriana, Rendition, etc. …seems to have been that whatever the U.S. did was always wrong — whether too little or too much.
Seeing as how neither Syriana nor Rendition depict Iraq in any way, and nobody involved in the production of Three Kings was involved in Redacted I find the hypocrisy charge here a bit difficult to grasp. If it were actually the case that Syriana was a film about the US “doing too much” to remove Saddam Hussein from power, then Hanson would be on firmer ground, but it very clearly isn’t. That said, even if Syriana were about what VDH seems to think it’s about, the point would be that the common thread is a lack of genuine concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. During the first Gulf War that lack of concern manifested itself in things like encouraging the Shiites to rise up against Saddam and then agreeing to let Saddam crush their rebellion. In the case of the second war we can see evidence of lack of concern in everything from the failure to do population security from the outset, the military’s lack of quantitative metrics of how many civilian casualties are inflicted by combat operations, our horrible handling of the refugee situation, and now our government’s apparent determination to ignore the stated views of all the major Iraqi political factions on the propriety of an open-ended American military presence.
40 Responses to “Three Kings”
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August 19th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Victor Davis Handjob strikes again!!
August 19th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Has Victor Davis Handjob ever been right about ANYTHING?
August 19th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Victor Davis Hanson is a moron and is a great representative of conservative morons as a definable class because he repeatedly and starkly demonstrates one of their chief deficiencies – a total inability to put things into context.
The U.S. encouraging the Shia to rebell against Saddam and then letting them be slaughted was a pretty horrible thing. Likewise, the stuff depicted in Syriana and Rendition is also pretty horrible. The context of those things is not isolationism vs. interventionism, but moral vs. immoral.
Idiots like Hanson can only see the world in terms of A or not-A, when reality actualy involves A, B, C and an infinte number of other variables.
Mike
August 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Uh … plus the fact these were effin’ movies! What’s with these nuts and the inability to discern fantasy and fact….
August 19th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
The Iraqi people have the same place in VDH’s mind as does toilet paper. Use, flush, and forget. Different sh*t, same asshole.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Uh … plus the fact these were effin’ movies! What’s with these nuts and the inability to discern fantasy and fact….
Because these nuts see themselves at the vanguard of a cultural revolution and no aspect of our culture is too great or too small to escape their sharp scrutiny for ideological impurity.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Sorry, but I need to offer a very limited defense of Handjob.
He’s a terrible, vile pundit, but at least one of his scholarly books is ok – check out The Western Art of War. His politics leach through a little, but it’s readable and seems intelligent, though I’m hardly an expert on the field. I think a big part of his problem is that he misapplies his legitimate expertise in the classics horribly.
In this, he’s actually better than Bernard Lewis, whose miserable scholarship blurs into his miserable punditry.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
What’s so illustrative about this is that it elides past any consideration of the actual conditions on the ground in Iraq whatsoever. There was a powerful anti-Saddam populist movement in 1990; there was no such thing in 2003. What’s more, there is a huge difference between supporting an insurgency and invading the country. An enormous difference. I happen to be generally opposed to both on non-interventionist grounds, although the situation is complicated. But this is the perfect encapsulation of contemporary conservative foreign policy, relating only to broad ideological questions and utterly indifferent to pragmatic and logistical questions. Hanson is engaging in exactly the kind of broad strokes thinking he derides.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
No the common thread is both moves are made by stupid Hollywood libruls who hate America!!!!!111
August 19th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
What Polly said, movies are fictional works written, produced and acted by people who are not policy makers. If Handjob is concerned about people being foolish enough to take the stories in Clooney’s movies as fact, his beef is with them not Clooney. Eh, but you can’t attack an anonymous mass of people who may or may not actually believe anything you are complaining of, so lets attack the celebrity.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
fwiw, Three Kings is a much, much better movie than Syriana or Redacted.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Hanson also ignores the well known fact that Clooney despised the director of _Three Kings_, David O. Russell. Now, it’s hard to know Russell’s current views, given how he’s prone to wasting his immense talent on bizarre horsebleep like _I Heart Huckabees_. But Clooney can hardly be called a hypocrite for acting in a film by an auteur he dislikes at a time when he wasn’t yet a major star.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Indeed, what most liberals disagreed with then AND now about the Iraq War was not the what, but the how.
Take out a brutal dictator? Great!
Do it without much international support, for a disingenuous reason, without the help of the State Dept., with charlatan-extraordinaire Ahmed Chalabi leading the way, with a seat-of-our-pants plan for reconstruction, wielding torture as an intelligence gathering tool, with no-bid contracts, with hired guns (literally), without an exit strategy?
Not so much.
P.S. David O. Russell is great. Especially when he appears as a raving lunatic on YouTube!!!
August 19th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Because the executive, in both cases, were wimpy morons: George and Emergency Backup George.
.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I think HW Bush encouraged the ‘91 rebellions in Iraq on the premise that Saddam was weakened enough that the President could get regime change on the cheap. The premise was accurate, but as it turned out, would have required some American resources.
From his point of view, it didn’t cost anything to give it a shot, knowing that he had no intention of committing those resources. He was able to use the defeat of the rebellions as a rationale for the control of most Iraqi airspace, via the no fly zones.
August 19th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
But Matt, there’s a range of things that the US could have done in Iraq, back in 1991, and in 2003. They could have invaded in 1991 and forced regime change then. They could have walked away completely and never come back. And then there were options in the middle – such as trying to help set up a rebellion, and working with the UN to impose sanctions.
And what the US chose to do is now considered wrong.
In 2003, much the same situation presented itself – the US could invade, could continue sanctions and clandestine warfar, could abandon sanctions.
And again, what the US chose to do was considered wrong.
You say ‘People suffered and died’ – but in every single option that we had, people would have suffered and died. In every single choice, some significant minority of people would have said ‘This is the wrong decision, and the US is a terrible, terrible country for making it’. Let’s review:
* We are bastards for not engaging more deeply in supporting Georgia (we hung them out to dry, we’re causing lots of suffering).
* We are bastards for negotiating with Kim Jong Il (we should have negotiated sooner, we caused a lot of suffering)
* We are bastards for going into Iraq 2003 (we had no business invading a sovereign nation, we caused a lot of suffering)
* We are bastards for pulling out of Iraq 1991 (we left a despot in power, and caused a lot of suffering).
In fact, I would wager that there is not a decision that the US can make that cannot be somehow subsumed into the ‘We caused a lot of suffering’ meme. Literally, every choice has bad consequences, and those consequences are used as fodder for the political opposition.
And yes, when Obama is President, the US will make decisions, and a different group of people will point out all the people who suffer for that decision.
If I have a point, it’s that if Person A can find fault in every decision made by Person B, Person B will eventually stop caring at all what Person A says, which doesn’t serve us at all. Yeah, Person B may not care in the first place. But Person C might notice when Person A actually acknowledges the complexity of the decision that Person B makes, and it might make Person C respect Person A more. And Person C might have some influence over Person B.
Just saying… Expect to be exasperated by how Republicans can somehow wring oceans of suffering out of every decision made by President-in-waiting Barack Obama.
August 19th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
You say ‘People suffered and died’ – but in every single option that we had, people would have suffered and died. In every single choice, some significant minority of people would have said ‘This is the wrong decision, and the US is a terrible, terrible country for making it’.
While this may be true, it is the job of the intellectually honest, reality-based thinker to analyze and evaluate the wisdom of American foreign policy decisions with the degree of nuance and complexity that are required to capture some semblance of accuracy. There are two-sides to every story. And partisans will always pick one side to exploit for their benefit. But that’s no reason for the rest of us to throw up our hands and give up.
Expect to be exasperated by how Republicans can somehow wring oceans of suffering out of every decision made by President-in-waiting Barack Obama.
As for this comment, every liberal acknowledges the truth of what you say. The important distinction to be made, in my opinion, is that the liberal faction that believes that every application of US leverage in the world is inherently evil constitutes relatively small and influential portion of the Democratic Party, while the conservative faction that believes every international problem can be solved by dropping carpet bombs is large, influential, and totally unprincipled portion of the Republican Party.
August 19th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
uninfluential, I should say.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
The cynic in me wonders if the ‘91 uprisings were encouraged for the same reason the Soviets encouraged the Warsaw uprising late in WWII, then stood off and let the Nazis slaughter the rebels. It’s a no-fuss way of getting potential independent leaders out of the way. Bush 41 and company may well have expected to go back into Iraq in a couple of years on some pretext or other (never guessing Bush would lose the 92 election) and saddam cleared the stage for them and the puppet exiles they may have hoped to install rather handily.
August 19th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
ush 41 and company may well have expected to go back into Iraq in a couple of years on some pretext or other (never guessing Bush would lose the 92 election) and saddam cleared the stage for them and the puppet exiles they may have hoped to install rather handily.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that Pappy Bush, Jim Baker, and Brent Scowcroft intended anything of the kind.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Everyone knows that all 12,000 unionized screenwriters are involved in every single movie.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
“agreeing to let Saddam crush their rebellion”
Oh yeah? You’ve heard the tape of Bush I cutting a deal with Saddam? Or maybe you’ve seen a transcript or a signed treaty?
It is not accurate to describe the US decision to shoot down Saddam’s planes but not his helicopters as “agreeing to let Saddam crush their rebellion.” The US is not responsible for everything bad that happens in the world.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Right after the Gulf war, US troops actively prevented Iraqi rebels from getting abandoned Iraqi army weapons and ammunition. Bush I understood that any probable Shia led Iraq would be friendly with Iran. Bush II “Shiwhat?”
August 20th, 2008 at 1:16 am
US troops prevented Iraqi rebels from getting abandoned weapons? That seems hard to believe, since US troops weren’t in Iraq. Got a reference?
August 20th, 2008 at 6:39 am
Re: I don’t think there’s any evidence that Pappy Bush, Jim Baker, and Brent Scowcroft intended anything of the kind.
I agree that there’s no evidence. I experessed a cynical POV, but one which does explain something that’s hard to make sense of.
Re: US troops prevented Iraqi rebels from getting abandoned weapons? That seems hard to believe, since US troops weren’t in Iraq.
Um, the abandoned weaponry was in Kuwait, and the US was in Kuwait.
August 20th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Examine the critique of the book on Alterman’s site by his contributor, Prof./Col. Bateman, and you’ll come away with a different view of the book:
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200710220002
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200710290004#2
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200711050002
August 20th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Syriana is maybe the single most misunderstood movie about American politics. Few people notice that it’s an imaginary MidEast, one in which there’s no such place as Israel. Oil is sufficient goad for corruption.
Of course, Hanson could care less. He’s just piling up names. I doubt that he’s watched any of the movies he complains of.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Bush I doesn’t come off well. He encouraged the Shia to revolt against Saddam and then got cold feet when they did. Without our support, Saddam butchered them.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:26 am
And the Middle East country at the center of the plot was fictional as well. Some people are just stupid. Then again, what else do you expect from someone who intellectually informed Frank Miller’s 300.
August 20th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
It seems Hanson hasn’t actually seen the movie: there’s a long and prominent scene in which a member of the Iraqi army (or the Republican Guard even) goes to great lengths to explain how his family has been bombed to smithereens by the US and how he doesn’t like Saddam all that much, but his country a lot and is just doing his job defending it.
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